Accounting, slavery and the slave trade: A multi-continental perspective

Abstract

As in other disciplines, the Atlantic slave-trade and New World slavery have assumed an increasingly contentious role in accounting history. In her Accounting for Slavery, Rosenthal has recently located many current business practices in the nexus between accounting, capitalism and slavery. Other accounting historians have explored slave-trading ventures from Africa, the role of accounting and slavery in New World colonisation, and in accounting and managerial practices in the slave-estates of the Americas. Absent from the extant literature are studies that explore the nexus between accounting, capitalism and slavery from a multi-continental perspective that considers Atlantic slavery as an integrated whole. This study, by drawing on the Trans-Atlantic Slave-trade Database, seeks to fill this gap, examining the correlations between Atlantic slavery and African demographic and social regression, European prosperity and New World accounting and managerial practices. In doing so, it argues that accounting played a fundamentally different role in the slave economy to that which it undertook in emerging systems of industrial capitalism.